The Contracts of Fiction reconnects our fictional worlds to the
rest of our lives. Countering the contemporary tendency to dismiss
works of imagination as enjoyable but epistemologically inert, the
book considers how various kinds of fictions construct, guide, and
challenge institutional relationships within social groups. The
contracts of fiction, like the contracts of language, law, kinship,
and money, describe the rules by which members of a group toggle
between tokens and types, between their material surroundings - the
stuff of daily life - and the abstractions that give it value.
Rethinking some familiar literary concepts such as genre and style
from the perspective of recent work in the biological, cognitive,
and brain sciences, the book displays how fictions engage bodies
and minds in ways that help societies balance continuity and
adaptability. Being part of a community means sharing the ways its
members use stories, pictures, plays and movies, poems and songs,
icons and relics, to generate usable knowledge about the people,
objects, beliefs and values in their environment. Exposing the
underlying structural and processing homologies among works of
imagination and life processes such as metabolism and memory, Ellen
Spolsky demonstrates the seamless connection of life to art by
revealing the surprising dependence of both on disorder, imbalance,
and uncertainty. In early modern London, for example, reformed
religion, expanding trade, and changed demographics made the
obsolescent courts a source of serious inequities. Just at that
time, however, a flood of wildly popular revenge tragedies, such as
Hamlet, by their very form, by their outrageous theatrical
grotesques, were shouting the need for change in the justice
system. A sustained discussion of the genre illustrates how
biological homeostasis underpins the social balance that we
maintain with difficulty, and how disorder itself incubates new
understanding.
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